Bobby Oster

Engineering leader. I’ve spent two decades building software and the teams that ship it, and I write here about what that work is becoming in the age of agentic AI.

Over a little more than twenty years working across software and consumer electronics, I’ve been an engineer, technical lead, manager, founder, consultant, and (less typical amongst engineers) sales engineer and sales manager. None of that was planned, I just kept following the interesting problem.

Those detours left me with a habit that most engineering writing skips. I spend a lot of time looking at the business underneath the technology - why a product exists, how it makes money, and how much that ends up driving the technical choices downstream. My background is in computer science and I stay hands-on; the teams I lead build with AI, agents, and modern tooling, and I’m a lot more interested in what that actually changes about the work than in the noise around it.

The other thing I write about is leadership. Growing people, building teams that do their best work, and figuring out what management means when your teams ship with agents. Some of that has nothing to do with engineering, it’s the same job whoever you’re leading. Whether you write code or lead the people who do, I’m writing for you - concrete, honest, and grounded in work I’ve actually done.